Smooth Creations Broodling Gaming System

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Overview and Specifications

Enthusiasts are familiar with the Smooth Creations team as the artists behind the airbrushed gaming rigs from the likes of Falcon Northwest, Alienware, and Maingear. Not as many may be aware, however, that Smooth Creations has recently expanded from the realm of painting cases to that of building and selling painted, customizable systems and laptops as well. These are not your grandfather's systems--they are all high-end gaming rigs with the specs and price tags to prove it.

For HotHarware's April sweepstakes, we partnered with Smooth Creations and Diamond Multimedia to create a truly intimidating system; and they delivered. In the pages ahead we'll take a peek at the system's design and see what's revving under its hood. Although not a full product review; this article is meant as a showcase of the sweepstakes system and to hopefully get you excited for the next great HotHardware sweepstakes.

The Smooth Creations Broodling is powered by a 2.4GHz AMD Phenom 9750 Quad-Core Processor residing on an AMD 770-SB600-based Abit AX78 motherboard, coupled with 4GB of Kingston Dual Channel DDR2 memory running at 666MHz. The AX78's Phoenix-based BIOS offers room for overclocking, made easier by the CoolIt Systems Eliminator CPU Cooler's combination of air cooling and liquid / TEC chilling. Driving the graphics is a Diamond Multimedia Viper Radeon HD3870 X2--a 16x PCIe-based card with two Radeon 3870 GPUs onboard and 512MB of DDR3 memory dedicated to each GPU, for a total of 1GB of graphics memory. A single 500GB Western Digital Caviar SE16 hard drive and Lite-On 20X DVD+/-RW drive round out the peripherals. Powering the rig is a 1,250-watt Cooler Master Real Power Pro power supply--which gives this system plenty of power to grow for future upgrades.